It is not directly about money, but DRM.
I admit that Steam has been good about email. For now. I have absolutely no confidence that my copy of Civ5 will work 10 years hence.
I have reloaded StarCraft and SMAC from original media a few times. Steam is free, but the cost is too high. The problem with the advice to put Steam offline is that you dont know there is a problem until well after the problem. Then it's too late and you cant go back.
I understand that developers believe piracy is to be a real problem. I understand that Steam is the least bad solution to date. In my experience, Steam has been quite terrible. Wish I knew what will replace it.
I feel the same way about the keyboard. Terribly flawed interface. Better than all the alternatives (so far). I dont know what will replace it, but I know we should keep looking! I feel the same way about PDF.
DRM is a joke argument. Your Steam account is attached to you, you can install any games you want on whatever amount of systems you want as long as you have access to your account. There's no DRM issue with Steam.
"Play offline" isn't the solution to your update problem. The solution is to go to the games properties on every game you want to keep in it's current patch state and set it to "Do not automatically download updates." Yes, you need to know about this prior to the updates, but it is the definitive solution, not "playing offline." Playing offline is a hack solution to the problem. The real solution exists.
Piracy isn't an issue. Developers found out with Steam that selling games for a reasonable price results in MORE revenue than keeping game prices high. Anyone who claims piracy is an issue doesn't understand why people pirate games.
http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/...w_deep_discounts_really_affect_your_games.php
That article shows how big studios who keep games at $60 for extensive times are missing the boat, and small developers marking games down 50-75% experience revenue (not only sales) increases of ridiculous proportions.
Fluffball said:
As for steam always being cheaper that is far from correct, i often buy steam locked games from amazon for up to half price what steam are charging with the only down side being having to sometimes wait for delivery but even that is often solved by the seller sending you an activation code via email.
Steam isn't always cheaper. But if you shop sales, you end up getting 50-90% off almost every game. The amount of games I've gotten for sub $10 is staggering. Obviously if you're not shopping sales, your experience is going to differ. But if you bought a boxed copy of Civ 5 and know you like it and are eventually going to get the rest of the expansions and DLC, they'll be on sale within a month or so here, and you can likely grab them at 75% off.
Then there is the issue for many people of the fact that even if you do buy a disc you often have to download half the game or even in some cases all of it from steam which apart from usually taking hours because the download speed is throttled also means that many people have to watch download allowances and when your downloading 10-20GB at a time that is a large amount of data and with the general ease of patching it brings only encourages laziness in games makers...throw it out to get some cash and we'll patch it as people complain...maybe, look at another 2k game which is on steam, Xcom which now appears to have been abandoned with a myriad of outstanding bugs left unsolved.
This isn't a Steam issue. This is a byproduct of the development system. In order to print a physical copy of the game, that copy has to be sent to the printing company early enough for them to do what they need to do to hit the release date. Game development doesn't stop at that point. The game is still being fine tuned, yet it cannot be on the physical media due to the fact that the physical media has already been pressed. Not a Steam issue, it's a game development issue.
Abandoning games isn't a Steam issue either. Steam can't force companies to update their games, and they don't care.
Anyone who pre-orders a game these days or buys it when released is effectively paying a premium to beta test the game for the developers where as if you wait a while you can pay half the price for a finished game or at least a more polished game.
Not a Steam issue.
Then there is by default the setting to update a game automatically which seems logical but as often happens with many games, civ 5 having been a regular case that an update will make saves unplayable. Yes you can turn this off but again it makes it a double edged sword especially that steam doesn't include an option to reinstall and choose which patches/updates to install up to like you used to be able to do so if you get caught out, your shafted.
This affects such a minority of the population that it's a non issue. I know there's some very vocal people on this board who believe that they should be able to play some 1.0 version of a game and then patch incrementally, but they are in no way the standard, or even a large enough segment of the population to be considered. The vast, vast, vast majority of people don't want to deal with anything less than the current product, and in fact, in most games, you're unable to connect to other people or the game servers if you're not using the current version. It is only by virtue of the fact that Civ has no viable multiplayer to speak of, and no game servers to play on that this is even an issue at all. Even so, many games of this nature will have incremental patches available elsewhere, hosted on their own site to keep a detailed log of this. The fact that this is not available for this game is the fault of Firaxis, not Steam.
It seems a lot of this "Steam hate" has nothing to do with Steam at all, and in fact is just misdirected anger towards other things.
